Massachusetts: Immigrant parents struggle to keep their children bilingual

Wed Jul 25 20:47:11 UTC 2007

Reminds me of a quote I heard from a friend, "The English only folks are like people who show up at a funeral and shoot the corpse."

Stan

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007 08:57:17 -0400
 "Harold Schiffman" <hfsclpp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Immigrant parents struggle to keep their children bilingual
> By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff  |  July 22, 2007
> 
> LAWRENCE -- After a lunch of hot dogs and rice, Jordy Berges blasted a
> ball off the wall of the lunchroom at his mother's office, his
> stomping grounds for the summer. "No juegues aquí," Yovanna Berges
> scolded her 7-year-old son, telling him in Spanish to stop. "Sorry,"
> he answered her, in English.
> 
> Berges, an immigrant from Peru, is growing accustomed to such
> conversations with her son. She is struggling to raise him to speak
> English and Spanish fluently, which might not seem like a big
> challenge in the city with the highest proportion of Latinos in
> Massachusetts. But researchers say Berges and immigrant parents
> nationwide are confronting a difficult truth: Their children are
> losing their languages.
> 
> According to research presented to Congress in May, even the children
> of immigrants prefer to speak English by the time they are adults.
> Rubén G. Rumbaut, a sociologist at the University of California at
> Irvine, and his team of researchers looked at 5,700 adults in their
> 20s and 30s in Southern California from different generations to see
> how long their language survived. A key finding centered on 1,900
> American-born children of immigrants. The shift toward English among
> them was swift: While 87 percent grew up speaking another language at
> home, only 34 percent said they spoke it well by adulthood. And nearly
> 70 percent said they preferred to speak English.
> 
> "English wins, and it does so in short order," said Rumbaut, who
> presented his findings to the US House Judiciary subcommittee on
> immigration in May. "What we're talking about is a real phenomenon."
> It is difficult for children to sustain their parents' languages amid
> the tidal wave of American pop culture, including movies and
> television, coupled with societal pressure to speak only English. Most
> schools and communities do little to preserve bilingualism, Rumbaut
> said. Even bilingual education programs, which Massachusetts voters
> dismantled in 2002, were commonly designed to help students make the
> transition to English-only classrooms.
> 
> Generations of immigrants have seen their languages fade, but Rumbaut
> said the cost is higher now as businesses expand overseas, the United
> States is more diverse, and national security agencies are clamoring
> for people who speak foreign languages. The children themselves are
> losing a skill that could give them an edge in the job market.
> 
> The erosion of language cuts across all backgrounds, Rumbaut said. In
> his study, less than 25 percent of the US-born children of Chinese,
> Korean, and Vietnamese immigrants said they spoke their parents'
> languages well. Chinese is one of the languages President Bush
> declared a priority for national security last year. Spanish was found
> to survive longer, largely because Southern California is a
> high-immigrant area and Spanish is ubiquitous on television and radio
> and in newspapers.
> 
> Still, gaps emerged. Almost all second-generation Mexican- Americans
> were raised speaking Spanish, but only 60 percent spoke it well by
> early adulthood, and half preferred English. By the third generation,
> barely 10 percent spoke Spanish well, according to the study; almost
> all preferred English. While Rumbaut's study did not include
> Massachusetts, he said it was even more likely that language loss
> would occur here, because immigrants make up only 14 percent of the
> population, about half the percentage in California, meaning that
> children here have more exposure to English.
> 
> Until now, much of the debate over language has focused on the
> successful campaigns in Massachusetts, California, and Arizona to end
> bilingual education in public schools. Bilingual education was still
> strong in California when the participants in Rumbaut's study were
> young, but Rumbaut said English still prevailed. In 2002,
> Massachusetts voters declared that all instruction must be in English,
> except for children on waivers that allow them to take bilingual
> classes and in a small number of schools that teach two languages
> simultaneously. Those programs, for example, teach English and a
> language such as Chinese, to native speakers of both.
> 
> Many Massachusetts parents and advocates say they are scrambling to
> keep children's native languages from slipping away. In Boston,
> advocates are pushing for more two-way schools. At Brockton High,
> children of Cape Verdean and Brazilian immigrants sign up for
> Portuguese lessons. Even Rosalie Porter, an author of the
> Massachusetts initiative that dismantled bilingual education in
> schools, said she favors expanding two-way schools as long as parents
> want them. Berges, who is married to an immigrant from the Dominican
> Republic, is raising Jordy in Lawrence, a majority Latino city, where
> 83 percent of schoolchildren speak another language at home.
> 
> Along Essex Street, one of the main thoroughfares, there are signs in
> Spanish advertising a store selling "Ropa para Caballeros," or men's
> clothing. Spanish-language newspapers abound. But her son is
> fascinated by all things American, including Spiderman and hamburgers,
> and his communication with her reflects that. The other day he
> complained of a headache and said, "I have a pain in my cabeza." "I'm
> afraid he's going to stop speaking Spanish," said Berges, an outreach
> worker at the community service center run by Greater Lawrence
> Community Action Council Inc.
> 
> Julia Sigalovsky of Sudbury, a scientist from Russia who arrived here
> in 1989, said she was stunned when her 11-year-old son suddenly
> refused to speak Russian after a few months in this country. When she
> and her husband chatted in Russian at the supermarket, he was
> mortified. "Speak English," he told them. With her second son, she
> tried harder. She sang him lullabies in Russian, hired a
> Russian-speaking babysitter, and inundated him with movies in her
> native tongue, like the Russian version of "Winnie the Pooh." Now 14,
> he hardly speaks Russian, either. At home, the parents speak Russian
> and their sons respond in English. Even the family dog, answers to
> English. "We speak two languages," Sigalovsky said. "It looks totally
> insane for somebody who is watching."
> 
> While researchers and advocates agree that children of immigrants are
> losing languages, they disagree about what to do about it. Porter,
> though she favors two-way programs, said English should be the
> priority of public schools. Parents can teach another language at
> home, she said. "It is an economic advantage, but every single child
> does not want to keep two languages," said Porter, who still speaks
> the Italian she learned from her immigrant parents. "Some kids will
> become professors of language. Some kids will become international
> bankers. Some kids will not bother with any of that, and they'll
> become successful in their own way."
> 
> Samuel Hurtado is coordinator of the Latino Education Action Network
> in Boston, where 39 percent of students speak another language at
> home, according to the state. Hurtado said the city should expand
> two-way programs so that children can maintain both languages. Many
> parents cannot afford luxuries such as tutors or trips abroad, said
> Hurtado, who plans to teach his 1-year-old son English and Spanish at
> home and enroll him in a Chinese immersion program in school. "We talk
> so much about globalism, and we're missing a lot of opportunities for
> our children to be raised bilingual," he said. "This is becoming more
> of a class thing. When you go to the suburbs, parents get the value
> that it is to be bilingual."
> 
> Some parents say they are more concerned their children learn English
> than their native language. But Juanita Garcia of Methuen said she
> wants her children to learn Spanish so they can speak to their
> grandmother, who is visiting from Puerto Rico. One day last week, all
> three generations went out for hamburgers. The parents and grandmother
> sat at one table and spoke Spanish; the teenagers sat at another and
> spoke English. "I want them to have two languages," Garcia said in
> Spanish. "But all the time, they speak English."
> 
> Maria Sacchetti can be reached at msacchetti at globe.com.
> 
> http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/07/22/immigrant_parents_struggle_to_keep_their_children_bilingual?mode=PF
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